DJ Bill
Finally riding a big boys bike
what I Have noticed on the west coast is !! that most bikes you would consider buying are bikes that are missing fenders racks chain guards and alot for some reason are missing head badges !
That's where all those eBay goodies come from! If someone wasn't parting out bikes there wouldn't be stripped frames lying around to make rats from.. (My Roadmaster project, while hopefully prettier than an average rat bike, started out life with me that way. )
I look at the guys on eBay with rows of chainguards and wonder... what happened to the rest of those bikes..??You can't tell me the bike shops sold the owners of those bikes new chainguards and just tossed the old ones in a pile for someone to discover twenty years down the road.....I'm thinking more like they took the junkers in on slow days and stripped the saleable and easliy removed parts off them before tossing the rest...
And the fender lights or horns.........always disappear. It amazes me to see them still on a barn find. They never worked for long anyhow. Heck the first thing I did when I got a new bike that had wheel reflectors in the 70's was take them off and hang them on the wall in the garage...( I thought I was saving weight on my Schwinn...)
It is inevitable that somewhere, after all the goodies have been stripped off and sold, there is a stripped frame awaiting its fate as a rat.